Riding out this dark age

An old time Republican speaks out in this op-ed in the Baltimore Sun and it's worth a read. I'll do a few snips but you really should go to the source and read the entire piece.

The psycho-graphic profiles of the electorate by partisan consultants contributed to a rising political hypochondria that permitted individuals like me to feel the pangs of every ideological symptom out there. The media-concocted red-blue divide offered an easy escape from having to sort through the complex issues.

But whether one thinks red or blue thoughts, the Blues must deal with the reality of terrorism. Yet the Reds claimed the security issue for themselves. Who wants to blow up a cornfield in Iowa anyway? The Blues, who have the most to lose, felt most secure in Sen. John Kerry's embrace.

In fact, Osama bin Laden's TV warning in the last week of the campaign clearly stated that his issue is with the American voters who have supported the interventionist and exploitive American policies in the Middle East over the years. His warning, clearly aimed at the red states, was ignored by the media even though the English translation was available.

Amazingly, pollsters told us that the dominant issue for the Reds in their electoral choice was "moral values." Gone was the traditional pragmatism that had served the democracy well since its founding, replaced by the raw emotionalism of the evangelical flatlanders dancing on the graves of Christopher Reeve and Rock Hudson. The Reds, in effect, elected a new spiritual leader. In the blue states, where high church denominations tend to dominate, they leave those decisions to cardinals and bishops' councils.

He concludes with this:

Life is cyclical. We defeated the fascists in 1945, and it took 50 years for their ideology to reassert itself. Given the quickening pace of political and social evolution, a new age of reason should dawn in about 20 years. Until then, I will detour my annual family vacation from a North Carolina beach to the Jersey shore. I will only eat California oranges, and luckily most of the good wine is produced in blue states, etc., etc.

The word Fascist has been used by the extreme left to describe the US government since the 60s, but the "F" word was used by this old Republican to describe the Bush Republican party. Do a Google search for fascism and you may be surprised how the actions of the Bush administration mirror the actions of Mussolini.

Iraq

The New York Times has an editorial this morning on the conference held on Iraq in Egypt.

Foreign ministers from all the right countries were present. The timing - two months before the scheduled date of Iraq's all-important elections - was promising. The Mideast location was symbolically apt. Too bad, then, that this week's big international conference on Iraq in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el Sheik, bringing together all of Baghdad's neighbors and every permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, did so little to change the dismal overall equation.

The fact that the conference came up with no solutions is not surprising, as long as the United States occupies Iraq there are no solutions. As Jazz put it so well "My position on our situation in Iraq is unchanged by the Holiday Spirit. We need to get the fuck out and we need to do it now." The US IS the problem in Iraq and no progress can be made as long as US forces occupy the country. The Times ends their otherwise decent editorial with a paragraph of pure unrealistic dreaming.

To begin changing this bleak picture, the Bush administration will have to work much harder at international bridge building than it did in its first term. Simply soliciting support for current American policies will not be enough. Washington must also be willing to consider changing some of those policies as part of a renewed process of international consultation. That might lead to more productive international conferences in the future.

Does anybody really think any of that will happen?

It is not in the best interests of the world or Iraq's neighbors for the country to be in chaos. Once the US pulls out altogether there may be some willingness for others to step in to try to restore order but order is not possible with a US presence in Iraq. Jazz is right, We need to get the fuck out and we need to do it now.

Happy Thanksgiving

I want to wish all of the Running Scared visitors a happy Thanksgiving and thank Jazz for giving this slightly left of center ranter from the Pacific Northwest another venue for his rants. Thankful for simple things, my Thanksgiving post can be found over at MEJ. Have a great day.

Religious Intolerance = Vandalism

A Roman Catholic cathedral in St Paul MN suffered damage when an apparent anti-gay exorcism was performed.

An informal exorcism performed at the Cathedral of St. Paul this month was more profane than sacred and was directed toward gay Catholics, police and church authorities said Tuesday.

They said the ritualistic sprinkling of blessed oil and salt around the church and in donation boxes amounted to costly vandalism and possibly even a hate crime.

The party responsible for the vandalism is suspected to be the group Catholics Against Sacrilege, a fringe group that perceives gays and lesbians who take communion as evil, and the incident was intended to reconsecrate the cathedral after the gays and lesbians had taken communion.

It's time to take religion back from the haters, killers and temple money-changers

It's easy for pagans like me to put all Christians in the radical wingnut category. One of my favorite op-ed guys, John F. Sugg, who does the Fishwrapper column in Atlanta's Creative Loafing, is a Christian who is not a wingnut. His commentary this week, I am a Christian, too is a must read for all real Christians.

There's a bit of schoolin' that God-fearing folks in Cobb County and the rest of the nation should pay heed to as they cheer the creationist team in a federal lawsuit heard last week.

The legal spat, over a warning plastered in Cobb schools' biology texts that evolution is merely a "theory" and not a "fact," has the world press in a tizzy now that evangelicals are perceived as political 900-pound gorillas (probably not a great metaphor when talking about evolution).
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Still, there is a "gol darn, I didn't know that!" lesson hidden in the Cobb evolution brouhaha, one that should be important to every Christian. It's a gem from the earlier "monkey" trial, the 1925 drama that starred teacher John Scopes, who challenged Tennessee's anti-evolution statute. The advocate for the religious side was William Jennings Bryan, one of the great men of principle in American history.
But, oh, heavens, Bryan was a died-in-the-wool liberal. He generally was described as a "populist," but in the parlance of the late 19th century, that meant liberal. Bryan volunteered in the Spanish-American War; that experience turned him into a fervent pacifist bitterly opposed to the nascent American imperialism. As Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state, he jawboned the 30 leading world powers to agree to a one-year cooling-off period before going to war -- no pre-emptive slaughter for Bryan.

Dubbed "the Great Commoner," he castigated the capitalists as enemies of common folk. Among his most ardent allies in a 1896 presidential bid was American socialist leader Eugene V. Debs.

In short, Bryan was a man who would have earned the scorn of Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and Trent Lott. If he was reincarnated and ran today for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia, Saxby Chambliss would air commercials putting Bryan's mug alongside Saddam's and Osama's -- just as he did to Max Cleland.

But hold on a minute. Bryan also was a fundamentalist Christian. At the Scopes trial, he thundered, "I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there." He was born again, he was an evangelical.
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Let's wind forward 79 years. Bob Jones III is president of the racist Bob Jones University in Greenville, a favorite haunt of George Bush. Jones, a storm trooper of the religious reich-wing vanguard that claims ownership of Bush, sternly admonished the president after the election, "You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ." Ah, I get it. Bush & Co. own Christ.

The letter also underscores the message hammered home so successfully by the GOP during the recent campaign: Liberals despise Christ.That's a lie.

The example of William Jennings Bryan -- and millions of others -- makes clear that ultra-conservatives don't have an exclusive claim on Christ. It's time for Christians to start giving witness to that fact.
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I testify that I am a Christian........

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I don't pay heed to the false prophets such as Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye of the Left Behind books because Christ said to beware of charlatans claiming to know when He is coming again.

The "rapture" isn't in the Bible, so it's not in my theology. I find it hard to conceive of Jesus returning to save a few smug Pharisees such as Jerry Falwell while brutally slaying billions of my brothers and sisters. The heaven I believe in has ample room for all men and women of all faiths who seek God and try to live good lives.

In the Book of Matthew, Jesus said, "Not everyone who saith 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father ... ." He told us his Father's will was to be meek; to be peacemakers; to take care of the weak, the poor, the afflicted; to sheathe the sword.

I believe there is truth in every word of the Bible, but as Bryan said during the Scopes trial, "Some of the Bible is given illustratively." I also believe there is truth in other faiths' scriptures, and I study them, too....

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War is not a Christian value. I'm a Methodist, and our literature clearly states, "We believe war is incompatible with the teachings and example of Christ."

In short, George Bush hasn't earned the photographic halo that our local gutless daily newspaper bestowed upon him on Nov. 5's front page.

The neutron bomb in the values debate -- the device that allegedly sunk John Kerry -- was gay marriage. I don't have the answers to questions about gays. Jesus didn't say a word about homosexuality, but he did say love your neighbor. That's enough for me.

What I do know is that gays don't threaten my marriage. The divorce rates are much higher in anti-gay Southern states than in gay-friendly Massachusetts and New York. Among Christians, the born-again variety has the highest incidence of divorce, according to a poll by Christian researcher George Barna. There are some lessons in those numbers.

The gay issue has been used solely to create fear and division, and as Jesus said, "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation." Thank you, GOP legislators.

The reason, most agree, that divorce is higher here is because of the impoverishment of the South, much of it the result of Bush's enrich-the-already-rich economics. For a final personal belief, I think Jesus was on the money when he said, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Pretty simple language.

So all you Radical Right Christian zealots, see what someone who has actually read the Bible and the words of Christ has to say. Maybe there is something there for you to learn, like the true meaning of Christ' message. Although I am not a Christian I have studied the actual words of Christ and found them to be a wonderful guide on how to live my life, that's why I'm a Liberal.
Cross posted at Middle Earth Journal

Shooting the Messenger

Kevin Sites the photo journalist who filmed the marine shooting an unarmed man in a Falluja mosque has been vilified and is telling his story.

"Since the shooting in the mosque, I've been haunted that I have not been able to tell you directly what I saw," he wrote, "or explain the process by which the world came to see them as well."

He begins by writing, "I'm not some war zone tourist with a camera who doesn't understand that ugly things happen in combat." But despite his attempt to be fair, he said, since the Falluja video was broadcast on Nov. 15, he has been "shocked to see myself painted as some kind of antiwar activist." Sites has received abuse and death threats on some Web sites, and has shut down the discussion section of his own.
[See this]

Sites' description of the events and his thoughts are in the article.
As I have repeated over and over again good people do bad things when they fear for their lives in the heat of battle. It is necessary for the American people to know about these incidents in order to make decisions about a war. We should not be shooting the messenger.

Holy War

As a follow up to Jazz's gloomy posts below I ask the question; how much of the suffering in Iraq is the Radical Christian Right responsible for? I had a post on an article by libertarian Paul Craig Roberts yesterday, Virtuous Violence. Although he discusses the policy of the Bush administration he has some rather harsh observations about the supporters of those policies.

Many Bush partisans send me e-mails fiercely advocating "virtuous violence." They do not flinch at the use of nuclear weapons against Muslims who refuse to do as we tell them. These partisans do not doubt for a second that Bush has the right to dictate to Muslims and everyone else (especially the French). Many also express their conviction that all of Bush's critics should be rounded up and sent to the Middle East in time for the first nuke.

These attitudes represent a sharp break from American values and foreign policy. The new conservatives have more in common with the Brownshirt movement that silenced German opposition to Hitler than with America's Founding Fathers.

"Reality Based" thinking would have to lead us to believe that the problem is the United States is much more than George W. Bush but is the result of a large percentage of the population who don't believe in science but do believe in a "Crusade" against the "non believers". Welcome to 16th century America.